Recently in Performances

It might seem churlish to complain about the BBC Proms coverage of Pierre
Boulez’s 90th anniversary. After all, there are a few performances
dotted around — although some seem rather oddly programmed, as if embarrassed
at the presence of new or newish music. (That could certainly not be claimed in
the present case.)

I recently spent four days in St. Petersburg, timed to coincide with the
annual Stars of the White Nights Festival. Yet the most memorable singing I
heard was neither at the Mariinsky Theater nor any other performance hall. It
was in the small, nearly empty church built for the last Tsar, Nicholas II, at
Tsarskoye Selo.

As I walked up Exhibition Road on my way to the Royal Albert Hall, I passed a busking tuba player whose fairground ditties were enlivened by bursts of flame which shot skyward from the bell of his instrument, to the amusement and bemusement of a rapidly gathering pavement audience.

‘Here, thanks be to God, my opera is praised to the skies and there is nothing in it which does not please greatly.’ So wrote Antonio Vivaldi to Marchese Guido Bentivoglio d’Aragona in Ferrara in 1737.

When he was skilfully negotiating the not inconsiderable complexities,
upheavals and strife of musical and religious life at the English royal court
during the Reformation, Thomas Tallis (c.1505-85) could hardly have imagined
that more than 450 years later people would be queuing round the block for the
opportunity spend their lunch-hour listening to the music that he composed in
service of his God and his monarch.

Two of the important late twentieth century stage directors, Robert Carsen and Peter Sellars, returned to the Aix Festival this summer. Carsen’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a masterpiece, Sellars’ strange Tchaikovsky/Stravinsky double bill is simply bizarre.

Plus an evening by the superb Modigliani Quartet that complimented the brief (55 minutes) a cappella opera for six female voices Svadba (2013) by Serbian composer Ana Sokolovic (b. 1968). She lives in Canada.

With its revelatory production of Rappaccini’s Daughter performed outdoors in the city’s refurbished Botanical Gardens, Des Moines Metro Opera has unlocked the gate to a mysterious, challenging landscape of musical delights.

Even by Shakespeare’s standards A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of his earlier plays, boasts a particularly fantastical plot involving a bunch of aristocrats (the Athenian Court of Theseus), feuding gods and goddesses (Oberon and Titania), ‘Rude Mechanicals’ (Bottom, Quince et al) and assorted faeries and spirits (such as Puck).

What do we call Tristan und Isolde? That may seem a silly question.
Tristan und Isolde, surely, and Tristan for short, although
already we come to the exquisite difficulty, as Tristan and Isolde themselves partly seem (though do they only seem?) to recognise of that celebrated ‘und’.

So this was it, the Pelléas which had apparently repelled critics and other members of the audience on the opening night. Perhaps that had been exaggeration; I avoided reading anything substantive — and still have yet to do so.

And strangely, though the opening night of the Los Angeles Opera’s production of Puccini’s popular work, was just such a performance, I enjoyed almost every minute of it. Then I got home and wondered why.

The libretto of Madame Butterfly by Luigi Silica and Giuseppe
Giacosa (the opera premiered in 1904) did not begin life as a sexy story. Its
origin is said to lie in the true story of a Japanese woman, named Tsuru
Yamamura, who in the previous century had a son by an Englishman, and who
attempted suicide when he abandoned her.

Oksana Dyka as Cio-Cio-San and Milena Kitic as Suzuki

Interest in Japan, newly opened to the West, was international in those
years. In 1887 French author, Pierre Loti, a retired Naval officer’s published
a fictional memoir of a Geisha dedicated to “Madame la Duchesse de
Richelieu.” Loti’s Geisha, Madame Chrysanthème, marries a Caucasian
and is depicted, after his departure, counting the money she received from him,
as she awaits a new husband. In 1898 American writer, John Luther Long, created
a highly romanticized and tragic tale of a Geisha he called Cio-Cio San.
“Chou” is the American transliteration of the word meaning Butterfly in
Japanese. The young girl, urged on by her American Naval officer husband, gives
up her family and religion to take on her role as an American wife. When her
husband returns years later with a true American wife, Butterfly kills herself
with her father’s sword. David Belasco’s play, based on Long’s piece and
famously cited as the inspiration for Puccini’s opera, consists of only one act
— at it’s premiere its companion piece was a farce. It does not contain a
love scene, but opens just at the moment Pinkerton is about to return. Belasco
enhanced the theatrical heartbreak of Long’s story by staging Cio-Cio San’s
vigil for Pinkerton with not a word spoken on stage as lighting shifted from
day to night and back to day. And he added Pinkerton’s dramatic appearance
after Cio-Cio San’s death.

The story of the abandoned Geisha appeared in world literature at a time
when verismo was fading from the Italian operatic scene (Puccini’s
next heroine was gun-toting Minnie) but realism was still a factor in American
writing. It was a time when playwrights and novelists writing about foreigners
and regional Americans were turning out dialogue in ill transliterated
dialects. We, in 2012, need to be grateful not only to Puccini for setting
Butterfly’s story to his exotic score, but to his librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa
and Luigi Illica for the poetic words they wrote for her. One cannot in this
day and age read the pidgin English that both Long and Belasco put into
Butterfly’s mouth without cringing.

Although this production of Madame Butterfly is new to Los Angeles,
it originated in San Francisco. The sets consist primarily of sliding shoji
screens moved about by what I assume were inconspicuously attired stage hands.
As one would expect there are few furnishings — certainly no chairs, the
whole, imparting a quiet, uncluttered look. Unfortunately, however, just before
the love duet, the center screens part to show an American double bed with
thick iron bars for its footboard and headboard. I don’t know what it was
supposed to add to the scene. All it added for me was jarring ugliness.

Oksana Dyka as Cio-Cio-San, with Patrick Lucaric as her child

Soprano Oksana Dyka, who made her company debut last year year as Tatyana in
Eugene Onegin, held back her large voice in the early moments of the
first act as the shy Butterfly, but let it soar thereafter in Puccini’s long
melodic lines. However, the subtleties of the young girl’s fears and desires
eluded her in the love scene. And whether it was poor direction, or some
momentary slip, her suicide was poorly staged. Brandon Jovanovich, just
returned from singing Lohengrin in San Francisco, was as usual a lithe,
handsome Pinkerton, and sang with bright clear sound. Bass baritone Eric Owens,
luxury casting as the American consul, Sharpless, who warns Pinkerton of the
heartbreak he was likely to cause with this temporary liaison, appeared at
times to be emotionally distant from Butterfly. I wondered whether it was a
deliberate approach to playing Sharpless, or perhaps the effect of singing so
many exciting Alberichs. Milena Kitic, an unusually clear voiced mezzo, was
Suzuki, Cio-Cio San’s maidservant. I have never seen as angry a Bonze — that
is, Cio-Cio San’s uncle, who accuses her of abandoning her people and her
religion in marrying Pinkerton — as was Stefan Szkafarowsky. One had the
feeling this singer had been waiting in the wings all evening for his chance to
explode on the audience. Rodell Rosel pranced about and sang well as Goro, who
brokered both the marriage and the house for Pinkerton. Museop Kim, a singer I
enjoyed in the company’s La Bohème last year, as Yamadori, and D’Ana
Lombard as Kate, Pinkerton’s American wife, did well in their brief parts.

Madame Butterfly, for which Puccini spent months studying with
Japanese musicians, and which incorporates Japanese harmonies and folk
melodies, is nevertheless one of his most accessible scores. From first note to
last, it is essentially love music — music that tells over and over about
love and longing. In this performance the Los Angeles Opera orchestra under its
resident conductor Grant Gershon, supplied passion, intriguing orchestral
support and the sparkle that sometimes seemed lacking on stage.

Yes, there were distractions and flaws: that gross “American” bed in a
serene Japanese setting, not much sexual tension as Pinkerton pleads with his
new wife to join him in it, and an ill thought out ending in which Butterfly
hears Pinkerton call her name before stabbing herself and nevertheless,
proceeds to do it. Why? For the silly childish thought,“Some day you’ll find
me dead and you’ll be sorry”?

Yet I had enjoyed the performance. And now I know why — because whatever
flaws there may have been in this production, whatever it may have lacked in
sparkle, it was a performance filled with lyricism in which orchestra and
voices made us aware of Puccini’s poignant affection for each of his characters
— and because Puccini’s opera is not about sparks or sex. It’s about the
original, sad story of Tsuru Yamamura, a story as old as our world, in which
nations and people still do not view each other as equals. Madame
Butterfly is an opera about the exploitation by a man of a dependent
woman’s freely and fully given love and its subsequent heartbreak. And this,
the Los Angeles Opera conveyed fully.